For my final project, I have a few ideas circulating around. To get the ball rolling, I want to play around with some of Spiegel’s findings as she urged the importance of explicitly teaching students how to use technology in professional and academic ways. I totally agreed with her stance that students cannot be expected to understand how to use technology in all of its functions due to them being youth and being raised with technology at their fingertips.
With this in mind, I would like to create change in my classroom where students are explicitly taught a technology skill they need to succeed. What first came to mind is explicit instruction of typing. Although in my opinion this currently seems basic, I have come to understand that if I do not give my first going into second grade students explicit instruction on how to type properly, they may go into third grade with very little experience typing essays which is a necessary skill for the RICAS and rest of their lives.
I want to take this a step further, as I believe that students are capable of learning through social interaction with their peers. While typing is a personal skill, I would like to give the space for my students to use their typing skills to interact with each other and develop their literacy skills in a communal way. One way I am thinking about this is by creating some sort of community chat room where my students can practice typing messages to each other and reading them. I would leverage this as a necessary skill because I am very much aware that my students are obsessed with Roblox, and by learning how to type messages they will be able to communicate with their friends through the chat function of the game. By creating space in the class for students to engage with each other through typed messages, they are practicing the technological skill of typing, increasing their literacy development by practicing reading and decoding messages, and becoming more connected as a class community.
